Life Ever After
by Terra
Summary: If a relationship is to evolve, it must go through a series of endings. Draco/Pansy.


Disclaimer: This is not written for profit. I don't own Harry Potter, which is copyrighted by J. K. Rowling.

A/N: Five different ways Draco and Pansy might've found their way to each other.

* * *

**Life Ever After**

by Terra

* * *

**Friendship**

They became friends after falling into bed in a drunken collision of elbows and hips (_rough; pointless_), slamming skin against slick skin until Pansy shoved him off and sighed, "We're terrible at this."

In the morning, she stopped hunting him and he stopped ignoring her. They laughed at each other, learned to laugh together. So when Theo left (_closed; unreadable_), Draco was there to toast her bittersweet freedom with wine so ancient he'd grumbled, "There are better-tasting ways to off yourself."

"Raided the liquor cabinet. 'S all that's left," she'd slurred.

Then he fell for Astoria: a whirlwind affair (_hurtling; breathless_). Their incompatibility out of bed paled against her blinding beauty. When she upgraded to a handsomer, richer version of himself, Pansy was there to tell him, "You don't know women."

"I know you," he muttered.

"And you're shallow."

"_What_?"

"Astoria overwhelmed you with her intellect, did she?"

"Let me mope in peace," he growled.

"Never," she said cheerily.

After bad breakups, she healed his nail-wounds. At bazaars, she designated him her pack mule. They shared gondolas in Venice and ices in Crete; they were young, rich, their days endless. Until they weren't so young anymore. She married Davies—he proposed to Lisa—his hairline receded—she let her figure go. Then they caught Roger and Lisa in bed; his fiancé yelled, "What did you expect when you spend more time with her than me?"

"We suck at this love thing," said Pansy after the porce.

"I love you," he returned.

"I meant with _other_ people."

"I know what you meant."

She said slowly, "You love me?"

"My timing needs work," he admitted. "But they say: 'better late than never.' This is me. Late."

"Very," she agreed. This time, they didn't leave his bed until night melted into morning into afternoon.

* * *

**Wiles**

When Granger stomps about brazen and obvious, it's just another Monday.

When Pansy Parkinson does it, it can only mean she's hiding something. There's nothing unusual about his housemates tucking secrets behind condescending, casual expressions, but when one of their own is carrying on with melodramatic furtiveness, halting in the middle of sentences, lowering her voice with a sly look, then you know the real secret is the opposite of whatever she wants you to believe she _isn't_ saying.

Draco's interest is piqued when she begins hinting to the Slytherin girls (and inexplicably Zabini) that she's mad for him. He catches her casting sultry, lovelorn looks his way when she knows he's staring. A normal teenage girl confronted by her secret crush will blush, lower her eyes demurely or do some daft girly thing. Pansy doesn't. That's how he knows she's playing him for the fool.

In Potions, her gaze flits over him like a warm breeze. In their common room, she sprawls in a rumpled sweater and _short_ shorts that make his fingers twitch.

"See something you like?" he drawls over dinner when he has been heated, chilled, beckoned and shunned, her plaything for damned long enough.

Pansy startles, as though he's caught her unawares (the deceitful minx), and bites her lip. "What do you mean?"

Suddenly she's fluttering nervousness and coy teenage girl and ever so slightly, she tilts her head towards Zabini, who watches her watch him. That's when Draco realizes what this game is really about, or rather _whom_, and irrationally, it angers him because even though he knows it isn't about him—dammit, she's using him so it _should_ be about him. His chair nearly falls over when he rises. Her eyes widen when he yanks her upright and drags her out of the Great Hall.

"What—" she sputters.

He grips her arms. "I know what you've been doing."

She splays her fingers over his shoulders, a gentle touch that burns and makes his throat tight. "What have I been doing?"

"You've been using me to get at Zabini."

Pansy hums. "What makes you say that?"

"You've been staring at me for _days_, driving me up a wall. What else could you want?"

"Maybe I knew that was the only way you'd notice me," she says softly. Tilting up, she brushes her lips against his mouth, and he feels the smile in her kiss.

* * *

**Days We Never Knew**

Even when she tries, Pansy doesn't always remember the low-hanging ledge, cracked in the corners, always dusty, and little more than an offshoot, really, of a lonely alcove in the Charms corridor. She discovers it by accident after tripping on the train of her Yule Ball gown. Darting out-of-sight to repair the hem, she startles, seeing a crooked balcony giving off the illusion of floating above the lake. But when she leaves, she forgets its existence.

Then one miserable sixth year night, she's retracing her tracks, certain Charms is where she dropped the ribbon Draco tossed her at breakfast, and blinking away tears, trying to ignore Daphne's malicious voice—_follows him like a starving pug though he couldn't care less_—when an alcove materializes out of thin air. With sudden clarity, she remembers the night she first found this place. Patting her pockets, she withdraws parchment and writes: _Go to the Charms corridor for anything you don't want to remember_. Then bracing her palms against the stone ledge, she shouts wordless nonsense until her voice gives out; afterwards she walks back, inexplicably calm.

The morning Draco rebuffs her concerns with barely leashed violence, she marches him at wandpoint into her secret refuge. "Once we leave, neither of us will remember this."

"Are you _daft_?"

Pansy shoves him back into the corridor, following him. "Why are we here, Draco?"

He stares at her scornfully. "Because you've got a wand pointed at me. Not that I can go any farther, what with this being a dead-end."

Satisfied, she touches the wall, vanishing it. "And now?"

Draco flinches as if struck. "What is this? Another Room of Requirement?"

"Not…exactly. You forget it exists when you leave. I keep notes to remind myself it's even here." They step onto the balcony, a small smile quirking her lips at his sharp intake of breath. "Beautiful, right?"

"Has to be some kind of Forgetfulness Charm," he mutters.

"Tell me, Draco. Anything. It's safe."

Hesitating, he straddles the chilly ledge, grey eyes half-mast, hands balled into fists. "I'm fucked, Pansy. He plans to kill my parents."

"_What_?"

"I've got to fix a cabinet then kill Dumbledore," he gives a bark of laughter, "or we're all dead."

"What—"

"I'm afraid," he whispers, reaching for her then halting the gesture midair.

She intertwines her fingers in his before he can draw away. "That won't happen."

"Yeah? How do you know?"

"I…don't. But in here at least, you're not alone."

Draco twists to bare her wrist, tracing her pounding veins. "What a cosmic joke. I can't even stand blood—"

"Stop that!" She turns his chin, smashing her mouth against his, swallowing the rest of his terror. "No one's killing anyone."

As she straightens, cheeks hot, Draco murmurs, "What the hell—won't remember this anyway," before hauling her onto his lap.

"T-This isn't why I brought you here."

"Can't help it." He kisses her until the world narrows into one pinpoint that includes only them. "Seizing unexpected opportunities is the family motto."

She doesn't know it then, but more days they never knew are yet to come.

* * *

**The Way They Were**

"Living every day like the last isn't happiness. It's fighting, living, loving too hard—until nothing remains. Sometimes…I wish we were old already. So we'd have survived all this and everything could be as uncomplicated as when we were young."

"It was _never_ uncomplicated," he said.

His wife smiled, an inscrutable curl of her mouth. "Well, I'm hoping it won't be someday. Being deliriously happy for a month then snarling for the next three—that's not enough."

"Don't go," he heard himself say.

"Stop me," she replied with the same look of expectation of wanting more, always _more_, that drove him into fury-bloodshot hazes. Remembering their interminable, cratered silences, he didn't move.

Pansy signed her name with the swiftness of compacting pain from an injury into one split second, another 'ex' in his column of failures.

"Only the end of _a_ beginning. You've still the rest of your life," said Mother.

"She claimed me already. Obligated to take her side or some such," said Goyle.

"I is sorry. Mistre—former Mistress is taking all the silver," said Verity, his one remaining house-elf.

Apparently, porcing your wife meant porcing everything you'd ever shared: friends, prized possessions, mementos, even Scorpius. He'd be damned if the Dark Lord wasn't making snow angels in hell because he missed the yapping nuisance. Three hours after he'd drunkenly claimed a partiality to that name for their firstborn, Pansy handed him a newborn Corgi, the dog tag reading 'Scorpius.'

"What?" she'd said when he glared from beneath drink-heavy eyelids. "You never specified our firstborn had to be human."

That first night, he slept with a flask of cognac, rubbing the tan line of his ring-less ring finger, scrap metal for all it was worth now. Returning hers relegated him to "that tosser of an ex-husband" – no more wistful, whispered _Draco_s; no more loveseats, last cuppas while quoting letters or trading newspaper pages. He knew that night, and the next morning, and the year after, that her last enigmatic smile was how he'd choose to remember the way they were. They'd always said everything best by saying nothing, revealing all their yearning, flaring and quickly smothered, and hopes for second chances.

At least that's what he told himself in her foyer, his mouth dry of any memorized speech, fingers bleeding sweat on his robes' tangled knots. When she walked in, a sea breeze on an unbearably hot day, all he managed was, "Come back."

After a pause, she asked, as though continuing a strand of an unfinished conversation, "Why?"

"Because if I said ending things was how I knew I missed you, you'd throw a sofa at me. Because no one else will ever care enough to push me. There's nobody as _right_ or wrong enough for me as you."

"You, you, you—what's in it for me?"

This might be the most important answer he'll ever give, but he doesn't hesitate. "Knowing you're waking up to someone who isn't just in love with you but _loves_ you."

* * *

**Never Let You Go**

Everywhere, they are haunted by a ghost with a negative age, unseen, never unfelt.

When he falls out of bed, and she doesn't, he tries to regret being a man of honor, of doing his damned duty by her. This, her, them – he might've refused it all if war, cowardice and ten years hadn't taught him the futility of raging against Gods in the sky and gods on earth. So he tries to recall what they have in common instead; when she's nearby, he can almost remember—taste, touch, feel—through the tunnel-long years to that bygone era of schoolyard one-upmanship and harmless flirtation, days he'd once called 'simple' without irony.

When he slides back into bed, and she hasn't stirred, he thinks about the night that led them here. He tells himself _that_ night was only about nostalgia: a once in their new-lifetime chance to recapture glory days and those cocooning fantasies of being _so much more_ in their fairy tale youth. Tracing the what-ifs behind closed eyelids, he dreams of second, third and fourth chances, of his blood boiling in anger, of gathering enough red courage to haul Pansy out of their mausoleum of a bedroom and force her glazed eyes to the sun. He wants to care enough to fight her back to life.

Twice a day, Draco murmurs, "You have to eat."

"Leave me alone," she always says.

One month, thirteen days and six hours after they return from St. Mungo's, he wrestles her to the ground, ignoring her feeble lashing, gritting his teeth against her screams, and drags her into the bath. He submerges her in soap of amber and rose, her favorite scent; when she chokes on a sob and clutches the side of the marble tub, he slips in beside her and together they drift in lukewarm bathwater, silent and wound tight around each other.

"Why are you still here?" she asks after a while.

"Where else would I be?"

"I don't know…celebrating in Bermuda, Malpes. Downing every Mojito in sight."

Ice floods his veins, a rage colder than anger. "Don't you _dare_ say that—"

"You never wanted him!" she accuses, clenching fistfuls of his wet pyjamas. "That's why you can go on. You never cared, never loved him—"

Draco grips her, white-knuckled. "I loved you. I loved him for _you_!"

"Don't lie to me! You only married me because you knocked me up—"

He shakes her until she gasps. "Yes, but a hell of a lot can happen in seven months. You know what happened? I fell for you, Pansy. In love. And this is how you repay me?"

"I don't owe you anything—"

"You owe me fidelity and love and death-do-us-fucking-part."

She wrenches his hand over her too-flat abdomen. "I lost him, Draco."

"I lost you both. I needed one of you to come back. It had to be you."

"I know," she whispers. "I'm…trying."

"So am I." He brushes her mouth with dried lips. "I'll never stop."

* * *

_Fin._


End file.
